I'm a bit late to the story about how the recent Washington D.C. train wreck may have something to do with the fact that the WMTA (Washington Metro and Transit Authority) used a contractor that outsourced ALL THE CRITICAL COMPUTER WORK TO INDIA.

I've been a bit busy dealing with the media and publicizing the plight of the American techie in the midst India, Inc.'s campaign to ethnically cleanse non-Indians out of I.T. I even got some press on Business Week after chatting with writer Moira Herbst:

Others seem less enamored. "While I do admire Matloff and find his work to be substantial, his contribution to our cause has been academic and largely ignored by the I.T. industry," says "Kevin," who publishes a blog that routinely refers to Indian tech workers as "slumdogs" (itgrunt.com). "THAT IS ONE ARTICULATE [expletive]", wrote Kevin in a post in April referring to Matloff. (Matloff distances himself from "Kevin" and his Web site and says his views are "unrepresentative.")

It is amazing how you create some controversy by quoting a racist slumdog CEO dissing Americans and follow it with the picture of a young Indian laying in an Australian hospital bed after getting his ass kicked.

Trust me, the two are not unrelated.

Now, back to the news...

You readers should know that, with the help of a few slumdogs, people are now dead.

...Vivek Kundra has many connections to OST. He was even on their board.

..But that wasn’t the only reason Kundra put Optimal Solutions and Technologies in charge of nearly 100 subcontractors eager for a piece of as much as $75 million a year in technology contracts.

And what about the role of Optimal Solutions and Technologies, a D.C.-based company founded in 1999 by Vijay Narula?

Though allegedly Acar and Bansal violated city rules by regularly meeting and talking, Narula said his company, which has about eight employees assigned full time to the contract, was powerless to detect such behavior.

Remember Sushil Bansal? He was the one that was arrested and jailed, and was the reason the FBI raided Kundra’s office. Acar has been charged with bribery.

OST is heavily involved in our transportation infrastructure. They even have an FAA Software Design and Development Services Contract. Vijay Narula is their CEO. OST’s contracts are some of the most important in the nation because they involve public safety, and yet it’s very difficult to find out where Narula was born–he is very much an enigma. Try finding his biography with Google, and get back to me when you find out something.

GRPA is another outsourcer that does business with the WMATA. They have offices in India, and perhaps they send some work there...GRPA is considered a minority owned business, which gives them a large advantage over other companies that want to win state contracts. The company name explains their minority status: G.R. Patel & Associates, Inc."

OMG! Slumdogs are now a protected minority that gets preference for government contracts??? WTF?

Here's what 2Truthy had to say:

According to the press release, BS also has strategic relationships with multinational project engineering companies such as Forster Wheeler, Bechtel, Fluor Daniel and Montgomery Watson who successfully use Bentley technology to run single virtual teams across countries including India.

Computer failure may have caused Tuesday's fatal DC Metro train crash, according to a preliminary report by the NTSB as they search for clues to explain why the computerized system designed to prevents such disasters failed. Outsourcing/insourcing American jobs to cheap, dubiously “skilled” third world workers is not only hazardous to the financial health of American citizens and the economy but to the U.S. population's health and safety.

I've already written about how offshoring loan approval work to India contributed to the sub-prime meltdown.

Now, after years of rampant offshoring to the Land That Time Forgot, aka, India, we are reaping what we sow. Financial disaster, and tragedy.

What did all these "offshoring to India", "hire any one but an American", "bring me a cheap H-1B" cheerleaders expect when they sent critical pieces of I.T. work to a country that SUPPLIES ONE THIRD OF THE WORLD'S ILLITERATE POPULATION? That is correct -- every third illiterate person in the world is an Indian.

Some of you readers may think that this is purely an Indian-bashing site. But if you read through the almost 200 posts and 10,000+ comments, you will find this forum to be open and vibrant. I myself like to think I am an equal opportunity hater -- if you are a corrupt, inept fuck-up, I'll write about you, regardless of your race.

It just so happens that the Indian-dominated H-1B lobby has incurred my wrath of late, and nothing is worse then to be the target of a pissed-off Marine with a weapon. In this case, my weapon is this blog. That, and my Beretta.

And every now and then, I get a comment from an Indian disgusted with this blog, but also honest about the impact that the venal forces of India, Inc. have had on the impression Americans have of honest Indians. Here is one such response:

"It is incredibly amusing to see how hard you try to 'expose' an Indian connection (and therefore, incriminating evidence lol) in every accident, fraud or other unfortunate event that you see.

I agree that your cause is genuine and deserves attention. Offshoring and visa abuse are causing wage depression and unemployment in the American IT sector, no doubt about that. Anyone who says otherwise is deluded or lying. However, you lose any and all credibility you had by employing your current method of 'protest'. I'm afraid to show you the way of Gandhi; you'd probably dismiss him immediately as a near-naked dalit slumdog motherfucker! ;)

My parents worked very hard to be able to afford an excellent education in one of the greatest countries of the world for their child. I worked very hard to earn my Master's degree and land a decent job. I sincerely believe (and have consistently proven) that I am good at my job; my American superiors have not given me any reason to believe otherwise. I hope you agree that I have a legitimate claim at living the American dream (please pardon the tired cliche).

Btw, inciting hatred and violence is not covered by the First Amendment as far as I know... but I have been wrong before. The people who read your blog and take to violence will be stupid butthurt idiots anyway.

Finally, I do not care if you are racist; that is a problem that only you (and the law) can help you(rself) with. This slumdog sincerely wishes you good luck! "

Now, this guy seems like a nice Desi. Note the absence of Hinglish, like "ur", "bcoz", "i will rape ur daughter in front of your wife", etc.

I have no qualms with this sort of Indian. What I do hate is the shower-shoe wearing booger-farmer that has arrived on our shores in last decade. You know, the creep that went through the 3-week I.T. boot camp in India, and now is being shopped around by his Desi bodyshop as a "Sr. Software Architect".

That, readers, is a SLUMDOG. We in the INSURGENCY know the difference between an Indian immigrant with an MBA from an American university, and a dowry-chasing scumbag here to make a quick buck.

So, like the American forces in the 'Nam welcomed the help of the vicious Hmong tribe, we in the INSURGENCY welcome the contribution that real Indian immigrants can make to the cause.

It's not like we are a bunch racists rednecks. Many of us are minorities and immigrants. In fact, some women are the most active members of the insurgency.

So if you honestly despise Indian-on-Indian exploitation, misogyny, bigotry, and all the other facets of the India offshoring/outsourcing industry, you should do something else besides threatening to sue me, plotting on ImmigrationVoice.org how to invade my privacy, and sending me death threats.

"Aneesh Chopra, President Obama's choice to serve a federal CIO, may face questions during his Senate confirmation hearing today about his use of outsourcers as head of technology in the state of Virginia.

Aneesh Chopra, appointed last month as the federal government's chief technology officer by President Barack Obama, may face questions at his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing today about his use of technology outsourcing in his previous post as Virginia's secretary of technology.

Chopra is slated to face questions from members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation during a confirmation hearing later today.

In 2007, Virginia signed an outsourcing contract for content management systems with HCL America Inc., ( download pdf) which is part of HCL Technologies Ltd. in Noida, India. The Virginia Information Technologies Agency does allow work to be performed at HCL facilities in India though individual agencies can add security requirements for offshore work, said Jerry Simonoff, director of IT investments and enterprise solutions for VITA.

Chopra was named to the Virginia post in 2005, just after the state government approved a 10-year, $2 billion agreement with Northrop Grumman Corp. to outsource the state's IT infrastructure, including its help desks and data centers. At the time, officials said the state's IT infrastructure was out-of-date and about half of its IT equipment was more than eight years old."

Some doctors are holding off prescribing painkillers after a hacker accessed more than 35.5 million of Virginia's most sensitive prescription drug records two months ago, a state official told a legislative panel Monday.

Lawmakers probing the state's computer services bureaucracy, the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, also learned that its former director was dismissed earlier this month after refusing to pay VITA's contracted partner, which had missed key deadlines.

Hearings Monday by the House Science and Technology Committee and a Senate Finance technology subcommittee focused on VITA and its $10-year, $2.4 billion contract with Northrop Grumman after years worth of state agencies' complaints over high costs and long service delays they have experienced from the partnership.

Lawmakers intensified their scrutiny of the six-year-old agency created to consolidate the state's diverse and far-flung computer systems after the Prescription Monitoring Program was hacked on April 30 and after the dismissal of former VITA chief Lemuel Stewart.

With the prescription database still offline two months after it was accessed because of FBI and state criminal investigations and work to upgrade the system, some doctors are reluctant to prescribe highly addictive painkillers such as Oxycodone, Vicodin, morphine and Valium, said Sandra Whitley Ryals, director of the Department of Health Professions.

"I do not have any indication, however, of how many that might be," she told the panel.

theodp writes "When questioned about his firm's US hiring, Information Week reports that Vineet Nayar, the CEO of the Indian outsourcing giant HCL Technologies, showed he can stereotype with the best of them, telling an audience in NYC that most American tech grads are 'unemployable.' Explaining that Americans are far less willing than students from developing economies like India, China, and Brazil to master the 'boring' details of tech process and methodology, the HCL chief added that most Americans are just too expensive to train. HCL, which was reportedly awarded a secretive $170 million outsourcing contract by Microsoft last April, gets a personal thumbs-up from Steve Ballmer for 'walking the extra mile.' Ballmer was busy last week pitching more H-1B visas as the cure for America's job ills at The National Summit."

I came across this post on the internet that details the how companies now give classes on how to deal with offshore teams. It sounds absurd. It is clear that we are dealing with an Indian workforce that is ill equipped to do I.T. work:

Interesting class – pretty generic. Things like don’t take a response at face value on things that are critical, like project status. You will often get told what you want to hear rather than the truth. You need verification. If you really want to know the status, you probably want to befriend someone on the offshore team who will tell you, outside meetings, a bit more of the way things really are progressing, issues the team is having, and things like that. Because it is a society with so many people, people will cut corners to get the things they want. There is a ton of competition and you have to take whatever opening you have any way you can. They are very impressed with degrees and certifications. You need to throw them out all over the place to get any respect. Your business card needs to look like a reading chard. PMP, MSc, etc. (Which I am sure is a lot of the reason people feel compelled to fake them).

Verification is key – especially in a formal situation and/or where there are different levels of management hierarchy involved. A lower rank person will rarely if ever be honest if someone over them in the reporting structure gives you an inaccurate response.

Look for proof – if the team says they are 50% or 75% or whatever complete with something, do frequent reviews of what they have accomplished. This is also true because although you document everything to a great degree, the interpretation of that is often way off.

Just from my own development team, some of my takeaways were things like

a) if you document it very clearly, but wrong, until the team gets really comfortable with you they’ll usually not call it to your attention.

b) when they do decide to get innovative, it’s frequently nothing like you expect it would be and you won’t get told about it unless you specifically ask

c) you have to have mock-ups, playbacks, etc. if you don’t, you won’t see the results until they are pretty much cast in stone and they are expensive to change. The challenge is that the team won’t want to show you stuff that’s partially done.

A really interesting example they gave in the class was enlightening because it made a lot of sense from a project standpoint (this is very rough, but you’ll get the idea). One of the trainers lived in the US but her mom still lived in India. For a gift, she had a ceiling fan installed at her mom’s house and she had the work done remotely. When it was all finished, she asked her mom how it turned out and her mom said it was really nice, but there wasn’t an on/off switch. When the lady called the contractor, the contractor said she hadn’t asked for a switch, so they didn’t install it. One of the things reminded ourselves of as we prepared requirements later was “document the switch.” If you don’t specify pretty much everything, too frequently it’s not there – even if it’s ridiculous not to have it there. Or it will be put in, but in a way you never would have expected, and no one will likely tell you about it until it’s all complete.

We had so many examples where this was true in the work we saw if we were not detailed enough (we are talking about deep, deep requirements). Another example was a pop-up window from an application that needed to have several fields filled out. Only the popup window was about 3x3 and you couldn’t get to most of the fields. No navigation and the window was too small anyway.

A lot of you have worked with offshore teams. Are these some of the experiences you’ve had? What else? In some ways, in retrospect (my immediate team is now all onshore because we just had so many issues with a multi-geo model) it’s funny to look back and see some of the inane results we had as a result of cultural differences, difficulties in communication (time overlap, language, etc), not having the right level of detail, and struggling with hierarchical mindsets (sheesh – send an email to someone telling them they need to do something a bit different and it has to get copied to 5 levels of management). Or- and I can’t even tell you the number of times this happens – send an email with 5 very specific itemized questions and get a half-assed answer to one thing. Keep sending email back and forth about 12 times until you get the full answer to all of your questions. And try to do this in some kind of a hurry (ok – have to skip email and have an 11 pm or 6 am meeting to get it cleared up).

I saw this kind of shit at the Curry Den. An Anglo manager would go up to an Indian and try to get to the bottom of some bug, and the manager would have to explicitly request that the fucking Indian not lie to him. These were his exact words:

Three of my four mortgages (that's right, I have four, on two houses) that were with CountryWide are now handled by Bank Of America, ever since the slumdogs destroyed CountryWide.

Think I'm making a leap of logic by tying the failure of CountryWide to the slumdogs? I'm now reading a book called Chain of Blame that writes about how CountryWide outsourced their loan application tasks to an INDIAN COMPANY:

That explains how all the shit loans got approved. I've already blogged extensively about how Indian offshoring destroyed this country's economy.

FYI, CountryWide was the ultimate Curry Den:

As for off-shoring, Countrywide does it more than any other company I've contracted to. Around 75% of the people I worked with were Indian. Unfortunately, companies like Countrywide haven't realized yet that its actually costing them more in the long run by off-shoring. These companies will never understand because the upper management never hears what goes on down in the trenches where the real work is done.

Anyway, I hate BofA. They helped kill an American I.T. pro, Kevin Flanagan.

So whenever I get a chance, I let BofA know what I think. Every time I make a payment, I send this little note:

"I don't think I'm going to be able to make any more payments. My whole department got outsourced to a pack of smelly Indians and I won't have a job soon."

And when they sent me a letter and wanted me to restructure my loans, I had another great opportunity. Here is what I sent the black rep that was handling my file:

Here are the W-2s. Please confirm that you got them. I don’t really want to do business with B of A. Your company is a pack of slave merchants. And as a black man, you should be worried. INDIANS HATE BLACKS.

Now go do some reading, before your job is outsourced, or you end up like Kevin Flanagan:

Kevin Flanagan was a computer programmer who worked for The Bank of America in Concord, California, USA.

Flanagan shot himself to death in the parking lot of Bank of America's Concord Technology Center after he and colleagues were laid off in April 2003. The lay-offs were due to the company outsourcing many computer-related jobs to less expensive workers.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Flanagan

When I Googled "Bank Of America Outsourcing" I came across this story from a few years ago that made me want to clean up my Beretta, barge into the Curry Den where I used to work, and aim for some red dots:

BofA: Train your replacement, or no severance pay for you

David Lazarus

Friday, June 9, 2006

Bank of America has been steadily moving thousands of tech jobs to India. The latest to go are about 100 positions that handle BofA's internal tech support.

While many of the bank's Bay Area techies accept the inevitability of their jobs heading abroad, what rankles them is the fact that, in many cases, they're being told they have to first train the Indians who are getting their gigs.

"If people want their severance packages, they have to train their replacements," a senior engineer at one of BofA's Bay Area facilities told me. "There's nothing in writing that says this -- the bank's been careful about that. But it's made clear at meetings what we're supposed to do."

Shirley Norton, a BofA spokeswoman, confirmed that while workers aren't being explicitly told they have to train their replacements or risk losing severance pay, they are being instructed that severance pay is contingent on satisfactorily completing their jobs.

Completing their jobs, in turn, can include training replacements from India, she said.

"I know that's parsing things a bit," Norton acknowledged. "What we ask associates to do as part of getting severance is that they stay on the job until the job is transitioned.

"It's a common practice when your job is being transferred from one person to another that you train the new person," she added. "We expect our people to stay until their jobs are consolidated."

Making workers train someone from India to take their jobs away isn't unique to BofA. Other U.S. companies reportedly have done the same in recent years.

But BofA stands out because it acknowledged earlier this year that it understands how much the practice offends its U.S. employees.

Barbara Desoer, BofA's chief technology exec, told BusinessWeek magazine in January that she was aware how much grumbling it caused when workers at the bank's Concord technology center were told they'd have to bring their Indian replacements up to speed before being shown the door.

"It caused us to make a greater commitment to our associates," she said. "It caused us to make a larger commitment to explaining the context of changes happening in the marketplace in advance of (changes) happening."

But it apparently didn't cause BofA to stop doing it.

"We've seen a bunch of Indians come through (the Bay Area)," the senior engineer said. He asked that his name be withheld because he's seeking another position within the bank.

"They're very open about it," he said. "They're here to learn our jobs and then leave. Some go back to India, and some settle in Charlotte, where the headquarters is."

Why would BofA hire Indians to work in the United States?

"Because they don't actually work for Bank of America," the engineer replied. "They work for Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services, which are both in India. They do the work at half the cost of what a U.S. worker gets paid."

Many contractors

BofA's Norton was unable to comment on the bank's contracts with Indian outsourcing firms. But she acknowledged that BofA has many Indian employees and contractors working in the United States.

"There are a lot, in a number of positions," Norton said. "We have been pleased with the quality of the results, the cost savings and the fact that it allows us to have a 24-hour clock."

She said BofA estimates that outsourcing has allowed the bank to save about $100 million over the past five years.

In 2004, BofA opened a subsidiary in India to process transactions and handle other operations. It now employs about 2,000 workers at three different sites.

The bank has also outsourced numerous jobs to Indian companies like Infosys and Tata. "It's a good business practice if you have the right processes in place," Norton said.

Representatives of Infosys and Tata declined to comment.

BofA's increasing reliance on Indian workers was made evident in a 40-minute presentation given last year to some of the bank's U.S. tech employees. BofA distributed DVDs of the presentation to managers companywide in April as part of a new program called Culture Connections.

One of the DVDs made its way into my hands this week, along with supporting materials provided to managers.

The DVD shows a roomful of about a dozen bank employees being told by a blond-haired American manager (who is wearing purple, Indian-looking clothes) that the presentation will assist them in "understanding the Indian culture and who the Indian is."

This is important, the manager continues, because of "the dependency we have on our teammates who are either here in the U.S. who come from India, or who we interact with on a daily basis who reside in India."

She then introduces the presenter, Shiva Subramaniam, who has traveled from India to give an overview of India's culture, including how the country has "specific gods for specific concepts," and how "it's almost impossible to look at an Indian and not associate him with the game of cricket."

He shows a series of slides during the presentation. Clearly visible at the bottom of the screen are the words "Tata Consultancy Services."

Working with Indians

BofA employees were summoned to "team huddles" last month to learn more about working with Indians. The meeting leader's guide for the get-togethers said the goal is "to build a diverse and inclusive workplace and to prepare associates to meet the challenge of working globally."

A "manager message map" for the presentation on India says that "all associates will be expected to participate in this learning experience" by the end of June.

Norton confirmed that nearly all of BofA's 200,000 workers are expected to sit through the presentation.

"We're dealing with a global customer base and a global employee base," she said. "So we've started a program for people to understand international business cultures."

Exporting more work

The senior engineer said many bank workers suspect that the Culture Connections program is intended primarily to smooth the way toward exporting more work to India.

It's also possible that BofA is responding to a 2003 incident in which one of the bank's software programmers in Concord killed himself after his job was outsourced to India.

Meanwhile, there's growing buzz in banking circles that a new focus on attracting Latino customers in the United States will lead to an increased number of call centers being outsourced to Latin America.

BofA's Norton said the India presentation was only the first in a series of a Culture Connections programs. Next up, she said: Latin America.

Well, it is a good thing for the slumdogs that I can vent online instead of capping some 9mm rounds into the heads of the shower-shoe wearing jackals at my former place of employment.

And thanks to the Insurgency, companies are scared shitless to do what BofA used to do. The word is out, and NO AMERICAN WILL TRAIN A SINGLE FUCKING INDIAN AGAIN.

Well, I take that back. Maybe we will train them to live in a wheelchair.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently announced that it will start conducting audits of withholding agents related to payments made to nonresident foreign nationals as a "Tier 1" issue. These audits may be mandatory for certain employers sponsoring foreign nationals working in the United States on H-1B visas. Therefore, all such employers who are audited by the IRS's Large and Mid-size Business (LMSB) Division can expect to have inspected their reporting (Forms 1042 & 1042-S) and withholding obligations under IRC 1441.

The IRS’s description of this issue is available here:http://www.irs.gov/businesses/corporations/article/0,,id=205415,00.html.

BackgroundGenerally, U.S. persons who make fixed, determinable, annual or periodic (FDAP)payments to nonresident aliens are required to withhold 30 percent (or a lesser rate under an applicable treaty) and to file an annual return (Form 1042) and to issue a statement to the payee (Form 1042-S). The payer is a withholding agent who can be held personally liable for failure to withhold. A "Tier 1" designation means this issue is one of high strategic importance to LMSB and may have significant impact on one or more industries.

These issues are coordinated and subject to mandatory audit procedures. The H-1B nonimmigrant visa category is granted to foreign nationals who will be employedtemporarily by a U.S. employer in professional positions that qualify as specialty occupations.

The H-1B petition process requires that a U.S. employer file a petition on behalf of the foreign national for whom they are seeking H-1B classification. As part of the petition, the U.S. employer must make attestations to the Department of Labor including that it will pay the H-1B employee the required wage and that it will provide working conditions to the H-1B employees that will not adversely affect other workers similarly employed. In addition to these attestations, the U.S. employer is responsible for properly reporting income earned and withholdings made to the H-1B employees.

Current InitiativeThe IRS will focus on the quality of the overall reporting and withholding systems and procedures of the withholding agents to ensure proper classification of payments, sourcing, and the validity of documentation of foreign nationals. This could include a review of the information submitted to and retained by the withholding agent to justify the reporting and withholding (e.g., Form W-8 BEN).

The failures of the withholding agent to report and to withhold may lead to personal liability and to penalties.

The discovery of fraudulent activities related to obtaining or maintaining the H-1B can also lead to severe immigration penalties, including permanently barring the U.S. employer from participating in the H-1B program.

This guy is awesome. In 5:50, he talks about Microsoft firing Americans and leaving Indians to work in Redmond. No wonder Vista sucks and the IE 8.0 rollout was botched.
In other news, more race riots down under: Another 'racial attack' on Indian student in Australia It is just a matter of time before this starts happening in America. It will start with civil disobedience, like an American techie will refuse to be escorted out of his I.T. department to make room for a WiPro/Infosys/Patni/[pick one] hack. Then it will progress to protests, where unemployed Americans will barge into the Curry Dens of Microsoft, Accenture, Wells Fargo, etc, and demand that ALL THE INDIAN VISA WORKERS GET THE FUCK OUT. Then it will get ugly. THERE WILL BE RETRIBUTION.

Disclaimer
The thoughts expressed on this blog may or may not be the author's own and are protected
by the 1st Amendment. Any attempt to reveal his identity by contacting a slumdog
hack at Google, or a corrupt Desi sys-admin at his ISP will be dealt with promptly
and severely. Civil and criminal penalties may apply if one is found to have used
private information in an attempt to get the author fired at the Hindu-only I.T.
ghetto he currently works at. In addition, any Desi who attempts to burn the author's
house down because they are enraged over his writing will be prosecuted to the fullest
extent of the law. This isn't India.